L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas – Paul Heyse

During the nineteenth century the great prestige form of prose literature in German-speaking Europe was not the novel, but the novella. The best writers of the time were hard at work crafting powerful, rich, narrative prose at lengths that allowed works to be read in a single sitting, works which were of at times incredible quality. Polished, focused, though they often were, the Novelle-tradition was also incredibly varied, ranging from the ecologically-minded ghost story of Theodor Storm’s Rider on the White Horse to the murder mystery of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Jew Beech Tree, from the moral tales of Gottfried Keller to the modernist-inspiring intensity of Georg Büchner’s story of madness, Lenz.  

With so much writing in a specific form, there soon came attempts to theorise, classify, exclude and include. Goethe called novellas a “sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit” (an unprecedented, extraordinary event that has nevertheless occurred), which, like his own novella (called Novella) confused as much as it clarified things. For Ludwig Tieck, it was all about the Wendepunkt – the turning point. Theodor Storm, in my favourite definition, called novellas “the sister of the drama and the severest form of prose fiction.” None of these is suitable for every novella, but each gives a sense of how at least some of these stories worked. They were mainly short-to-medium length narratives with a high symbolic charge, focusing on an important event in the life of a single individual.  

One other writer whose theory is known to students of the Novelle-tradition is Paul Heyse, one of Germany’s first Nobel Laureates and creator of the “Falkentheorie”. As described by Idara Crespi in the introduction to a new edition of four of Heyse’s novellas translated by Renata Lenz, L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas, this is “a pivot. The point where all the accumulated pressure of the narrative tilts and pours in one direction.” It is also something specific which sets the story apart from all others – a particular thing, or even just a moment that seems utterly unique. In the title story a girl bites the man who tries to seduce her, in another what is special is a work of embroidery.

I had not read Heyse before, so when Crespi’s Espresso publishing house, which aims to focus on furnishing unjustly-forgotten European works with new translations, asked me whether I would like a copy, I agreed without difficulty. This blog’s own focus is similar, after all. The review, however, comes only from me.  

The Stories 

Paul Heyse was born in Berlin in 1830, but he spent most of his long life in Munich, where he passed away in 1914, after winning the Nobel Prize two years earlier. The time when Heyse was not in Munich he largely spent in Italy. Like many German artists, most famously Goethe, Heyse found in the southern country a wellspring of inspiration. The four novellas collected in L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas showcase the extent of that inspiration. The title story is a drama set in a coastal fishing village. The Embroiderer of Treviso is a historical tale from north Italy, while The Wedding on Capri is a kind of comedy of manners where German tourists come up against Italian mores. The last, Nerina, is a dramatization of a key moment from the life of the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. Each is entirely unlike the others, which does mean that the enjoyment of such a collection is bound to be a matter of personal taste.  

For me, my favourites were the first story, L’Arrabbiata, and the last one, Nerina. I liked the The Embroiderer of Treviso as well, while I felt The Wedding on Capri was more like a weak version of the kind of tale Stefan Zweig (or even Henry James) would later perfect. 

L’Arrabbiata  

Laurella, a poor young woman in Sorrento across from the island of Capri, is “L’Arrabbiata” – the angry one. Her father is dead, her mother ill and unable to survive without her daughter’s support. One day Laurella crosses over to Capri, intending to sell some materials to two women there. The boatman is a young man, Antonino. They avoid one another’s eyes. The only other passenger is a priest. After chatting about her mother’s health, the priest chides her for her reputation as one who will not dance or sing with others, and mentions a suitor who was rejected in the past by her. She explains that she has a private reason for her actions and decision “to be subject to no man who would ill-use me and then caress me”. It is the abuse she witnessed her mother receive at the hands of her father which makes her determined to defend herself as her mother could not.  

The priest is to stay the night on Capri to tend to a sufferer there, leaving Antonino to take Laurella back on her own later that day. During the journey they sit “like the bitterest enemies”, before eventually an argument breaks out. The boatman declares “that here you are in my power, and must do what I will” and seizes her, only to find his hand bitten and bloodied. “Must I do what you will?” Laurella asks, then leaps into the open sea. But when Antonino recovers himself and tells her she is too far from land to survive she climbs back in and rows with him back to the shore in silence. Later that night, however, she comes to him with healing herbs and apologises, even breaks into tears. Love, at least of a sort, is admitted, and with that the story draws to a close. 

L’Arrabbiata was one of the first novellas Heyse wrote and remains his most famous. That bite is strange and unforgettable. But that does not quite answer what makes it interesting. One way to look at that, as it often is with novellas, is through the idea of determinism. Fate, in other words. 

L’Arrabbiata as Tale of Fate 

All but the most inventive fiction is determinist by its very form, as the words are fixed upon the page long before we open up the book. But with novellas this feeling is particularly stark. They are simply not long enough even to give the illusion of an alternative, of branching paths. Instead, we often have a sense of characters hurtling towards their doom. So it is, in a way, in L’Arrabbiata. Laurella knows what fate wants for her – a marriage – and fears the violence, the “look in his eyes” that men have when they alternate between abuse and tender words. Her rejection, before the novella begins, of another suitor, seems to indicate her victory in the struggle with her fate. In becoming “the angry one”, she has let herself be defined in a way that makes her safe at a cost of partial isolation from her community.  

But she is not safe. Antonino loves her and does not resist his own feelings. At first, he tries to use the weight of society’s judgement to force her into his arms – “one day you’ll grow lonely, and then, wild as you are, you’ll take the first man who comes”. When that does not work, he turns to force. Laurella’s bite seems at first glance like her successfully resisting him, but I read it much more negatively. She gains a moment, but soon enough she has to return to the boat. Like trains in 19th century fiction, the boat of L’Arrabbiata is ultimately a symbol of the limited choices people, but especially women, had in life. Laurella can drown, or she can get back in. She chooses life over principles. But also, I think, because those principles have already been damaged beyond repair.  

In reacting with force herself, by drawing blood, Laurella essentially discovers to herself that she is no better than the men. (Though, perhaps she had no choice.) This is reflected too by the tears (another liquid) that pour down her cheeks when she meets Antonino later in the evening. Her surrender to him is, on the one hand, an acknowledgement of her own repressed romantic feelings. On the other, it’s a surrender to the idea that she is, like the men, at base capable of cruelty and violence. That, in a way, they deserve one another. L’Arrabbiata is a love story with a happy ending, but it’s also a kind of tragedy, as Laurella’s idea of herself is crushed by the reality of her feelings and actions. The end result is that the forces of patriarchal society, emphasised by the priest – who gets the final word – are victorious.  

Freedom was mere illusion, the woman who tried to be an individual was crushed. But as often happens with novellas, it made for a good story.   

Nerina  

My second favourite of the novellas collected in L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas was Nerina. This is a tale of a moment from the life of the marvellous pessimist Giacomo Leopardi, an Italian poet of the early 19th century beloved by Schopenhauer. As with L’Arrabbiata, indeed with all the stories here, it’s a love story. Leopardi, returned to his family home in Recanati, meets his neighbours’ daughter, Nerina, much older now than when last he saw her, and like Laurella, an independent spirit. She has even read Leopardi’s poems, even though they have been censured by the Church. Her youthful spirit makes an impression on Leopardi, whose gloom is the overriding characterisation Heyse gives us of him besides his well-known ill-health. At the same time, Leopardi is shocked by the effect he has had on her – “forget the premature and mournful wisdom you have learned from my poems!” 

That night, they exchange, from window to window, his latest poem for a bouquet of carnations and some of her hair. But like a miserable figure in a work of Dostoevsky’s, Leopardi is confused and unnerved by his own feelings and resolves to avoid her thereafter. It does not work. Her father wants to enlist Leopardi to convince Nerina to marry a suitor she does not wish to, turning him into the agent of the forces of society he has little respect for. Nevertheless, he agrees, telling her off for “hav[ing] nothing to do with the happiness [the suitor] has chosen for you”. She listens, responds by reciting his own poetry to him with its “bitter joys”, and the two of them end in an embrace. Yet still he goes, encouraging her to ignore his poetry and its messages: 

“Promise me – when I am gone – that you will try to find your way into life as thousands do. I am not asking you to do violence to your heart. But you are young, Nerina, and life transforms us in wondrous ways.” Leopardi leaves and, perhaps predictably, a few months later learns of her death. She did not, it seems, find her way into life after all. 

Ways into Poetry 

As with L’Arrabbiata, we can read Nerina through the lens of fatalism, but here it is less interesting. The novella is trapped not by its form, but by the facticity of at least one of its central figures. (Nerina’s identity and reality remain debated by scholars). The story here can only end one way. Nerina will become a poem; Leopardi will continue being a poet.  

Instead, what I liked about Nerina was the how it worked in Leopardi’s poetry. Many 19th century novellas took artists as their subjects, from Grillparzer’s The Poor Musician to Mörike’s Mozart on the Way to Prague, but Nerina, taking as it does a poet as the artist, is able to achieve a better integration of creation into itself. The story begins shortly after Leopardi has finished writing his most famous poem, “L’infinito”, in 1819, and finishes with him considering the lines to Nerina he placed within his later poem, “Le Ricordanze” (Memories), written in 1829 while at home again. But Nerina takes Leopardi’s ideas and tries to integrate them into her own barred, limited life at home. She poeticises her life.  

When she meets the poet there’s a shock, because he had not appreciated the impact his own words might have had. That in a way, living, she has become more of a poet than he is. Leopardi is not the hero of this work, as the title should have warned me. He tries to turn her away from the kind of poetically-charged life he allows himself, and acts as an instrument of a society he himself has no belief in. She, meanwhile, dies for beauty. Leopardi’s despairing response, the text argues, is creation. He may have failed to be true to her while alive, but at least he can be true to her in his verse. The outcome is bittersweet, but true enough to my understanding of Leopardi’s pessimism. In his failure before Nerina, we can see an example of the way that his own actions might have fed into his disappointment with life, a disappointment that runs through all his work.  

Conclusion 

The other stories are all novellas serious enough to handle a blog post’s worth of analysis, especially the The Embroiderer of Treviso, which combines the historical writing of C.F. Meyer and the bloodiness of Kleist, but space is limited and so is our time. I have been glad to get a little acquainted with Heyse even if, at this point, I am still not quite sure how far I like him or even really know who he is. A collection like L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas shows his range, but there seems no solid commonality under all these works, nothing distinctly “Heysian”, in the in the way that I think there is for Storm, Stifter, Kleist, or E.T.A. Hoffmann. This, maybe, makes the collection a good first introduction to the kind of things that were possible for the magicians who wrote novellas, even if, the title story perhaps excepted, I would not say these are the best novellas I have yet read.  

Nevertheless, I can easily recommend this book to those who are interested in the craft of writing. I think novellas in particular are incredible teaching devices for writers. More expansive than short stories, they guide us on shape, on prose, on narration, in ways that novels can do but often fail to do, with so much else going on. The inventiveness of the form has not yet been exhausted, as contemporary fiction, in German and not, has shown on this blog. (See Grass, Walser) Reading something like this collection a good introduction to just some of the possibilities on offer, and I hope that the translator, Renata Lenz, is able to translate more novellas from the original. The tradition really is wonderful and thoroughly underappreciated outside of Germany.  

Thanks to Chiara and Espresso for the copy. More details on their website, or in the usual places where books are sold online.

The book was provided without an obligation to review or link onwards attached. While I wouldn’t mind continuing to read similar new old texts from time to time as it is in line with what I write about anyway, if regular readers of the blog would much prefer this to be my only foray into Bookfluencing, feel free to reach out privately via the contact form / email.

How Much Use is A Writer’s Journal? Handke’s “Das Gewicht der Welt”

Earlier this year I read a strange but wonderful novella by the Austrian Nobel Laureate Peter Handke, Afternoon of a Writer. This work describes a few hours in the life of a writer, focusing on how the world comes to him as someone trying to perceive it creatively. We can see not just the beauty the writer finds within things, but also those moments when his perception begins to take an impression and work out how to integrate it into something more, adding meanings beyond what is directly apparent. It’s the most brilliant representation of how creativity might work (for some) that I have yet read. 

Reading Handke is never exactly fun for me, but always rewarding. Turning to his journal of 1975-77, Das Gewicht der Welt (The Weight of the World), what I was interested in was the relationship between this text as a journal of impressions and the more directed, intentional work of Afternoon of a Writer. While Handke began Das Gewicht der Welt planning to integrate it into some kind of prose or dramatic work, he soon decided to broaden the scope of his notes to make it simply the “spontaneous noting-down of purpose-free perceptions”. 

What we end up with, then, is simply impressions, recorded over two years in the life of a man. Things noticed and felt, raw materials following pre-processing rather than the refined product of The Afternoon of a Writer. The book declares in its dedication that it is for those “whom it concerns”. This is fair – it’s probably not for many. The majority of Handke’s observations are simply not particularly exciting. Inevitably so – one of its most memorable lines is “Never search for comparisons – one experiences them”. We readers, seeing them written rather than felt, suffer for the distance. 

Handke wrote the things he wrote with a sense that they had some kind of value – he often notes his excitement to be finished with a conversation so he can write down some details, or his instinctual reaching for his notebook in the street. But unlike with an aphorism, this value may be only for him at this raw stage, and noticing the light is not the same thing as a practical insight on human behaviour which an aphorism often strives for.  

As readers, we can attempt to be detectives, trying to see why he thought this particular thought was worth remembering. But this is far less rewarding than what we can get from Afternoon of a Writer, where we get not just an image but also its transformation into something luminous with meaning. Reading the journal is like trying to work on a cold case with no guarantee of success; reading the novella is more like reconstructing an event from a murderer’s confession and a bunch of scattered clues.  

All those things we can get from Das Gewicht der Welt we can get as well, if not better, from Handke’s other prose. His perceptiveness regarding things like smells and sounds, his willingness to look at an action and relentlessly break it down into its components. If we can get those things elsewhere, the core value of the book might simply be the knowledge that Handke’s perceptiveness is the result of real work and real observations. A skill, trained and practiced. Not inspiration alone by any stretch.  

Still, we must try to enjoy what we have too. A man on the street – “A man who sits sunken, tries repeatedly to set himself upright, to show his good posture, but each time sinks back into the same pose – finally, he is satisfied with it”. Another man reading a water bottle, “constantly slowly rotating it.” All of these are telling details but they tell us nothing except that Handke has noticed them – removed from a fictional setting, what do they do for us? There is no meaning behind the meaning, no thematic framework.  

The value is simply the observing, not the things observed. But that makes the work hard to read even if enhancing our own watchfulness is our goal. We read a phrase like “sulphur-yellow late-afternoon light in the bedroom, and the feeling that one has already lain there a while a corpse,” and can do nothing with it except appreciate its aptness and try to see what the light looks like in our own rooms. Handke’s is not our perception to use, nor does what he see cohere as part of a whole in the context of this work or any other. For all those texts he wrote concurrently, such as The Left-Handed Woman, he kept separate notebooks. An overwhelming sense of a deliberate meaningless does not make for pleasurable reading.  

I have written before of my intention to start keeping a writing journal of my own, and one of the successes of Das Gewicht der Welt is that it did give me a push to get started. A push and, to a certain extent, a model. The way Handke writes down things and says “a story could begin with this”, or how he gives hints about how he has come to his perceptions – “I decided not to buy a newspaper for the metro – that way I could experience more” – all of this was not wasted on me. Without such a desire to become an observer, however, it’s hard to see the book as anything but a slog. 

I felt at times I could look behind observations and see the author, sat on a park bench too far away to hear a conversation but fixated upon the gestures of the conversant ones. Handke, as one of the most perceptive of writers, is absolutely a good person to learn observation from. The ruthless breaking-down of emotions (tiredness as an assault of the deja-vu was a favourite here), the breaking-down of actions, the observation of smell and sound and taste. In that sense, I have gained plenty from the work, even as I cannot easily commend it to others’ attention.

“The river water supremely textured, as if it were already frozen in place.”  

“A Japanese family crossing the street. Husband, wife, and two daughters. All three women are exactly the same height, reaching only the man’s shoulders.” 

“The sound of a hosepipe in the meadows like someone repeatedly ripping a piece of fabric”

We have shifted from Handke to me now, a few of my notes from a recent sojourn in the Alps. I do not want to suggest I have reached Handke’s level in my finished fiction, but as far as observations go, I don’t think these three random extracts from my little notebook are too far from his own in quality. That is probably another reason why I find it hard to recommend Das Gewicht der Welt. Noticing, ultimately, is probably not the hard part of writing. Flaubert told Maupassant to stare at a tree long enough to understand what separates it from all other trees, but how far does this actually matter?  

Not so much, I think. (And indeed, when I read Maupassant recently I was not particularly impressed). Absolutely everything on the street is novel, never-quite-before-seen. Every person is unique. But fiction is not really about uniqueness itself, so much as competent coherence when dealing with something particular. Can we find a way of saying something new, whether that’s a new thematic network, or a new configuration of events designed to develop some reader’s emotional response? Can we say something new in a new way, or a more real way?  

Paying absolute attention to what happens on the street is only really a path to a kind of meaningless realism, caked suffocatingly in details. I picked up Das Gewicht der Welt because I thought the “weight” of the title would be emotional, but I now think it really is just the weight of all Handke’s impressions upon him. The real difficulty with fiction, however, comes instead from caring enough about a thing or way of telling to use all those details effectively while discarding the rest. For Handke, that care is about perception itself. For another writer it might be something different, like God or love or money.  

Reading another writer’s notebook like Das Gewicht der Welt is occasionally fascinating, and helpful as a guide to begin your own, but I’ve come to see it’s not really as much help as perhaps I had hoped. As with mining, where the primary value addition is never getting rocks out of the earth’s crust, but rather the process of milling, refining, and polishing, that turns raw materials into usable products, so too here the impressions are not nothing, but not where the real magic is either. For that magic, and for a far deeper sense of what a writer like Handke does, The Afternoon of a Writer is a much better thing to read.  

Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Idiot

Dostoevsky is a writer who has long been extremely important to me. During my teens, before this blog existed, I devoured the great novels, one after another, and then over and over. The Brothers Karamazov, without exaggeration, changed my life. Ultimately, its author became the embodiment of what I took to be a distinctively Russian approach to literature – an approach that treated what I then took to be the most important questions in life directly, without encrusting them with layers of social drama and squabbling over inheritances that I associated then (as now) with fiction from my own country. In Dostoevsky’s works people said exactly what mattered to them, and did the things that showed it mattered to them – they murdered, they threw tantrums, and sometimes even took their own lives. Dostoevsky inspired me precisely because he was clumsy, lazy, and disorganised in his writing. He showed a budding writer, dangerously, that so long as characters felt sufficiently, they became real and nothing else need matter. 

The Idiot, however, was never one of my favourites among Dostoevsky’s works. For one, it is Dostoevsky at his strangest. With its story of jealousy and obsession in love it is also a comparatively less interesting work, at least at first glance, to someone lusting after ideas. (At the time I was a Dostoevsky maniac I went to a boys’ school and didn’t know what a girl looked like, let alone how something like obsessive love worked.) Still, I’ve returned to this work after many years away because I believed it might be essential to a writing project of my own. The idea of the central character, a kind of Christ-like innocent, thrust into the world of scheming men and women, was what drew me back. But what turned out to be still more interesting was a kind of higher-order thematic framework here of logic and disorder, coherence and chaos.   

I am obliged to you to provide a summary of the plot, but unfortunately I do not have any idea what actually happened and I’m not sure Dostoevsky did either. Or rather, I know he did not. Gary Saul Morson, among other academics, has noted that after finishing the novel’s first part Dostoevsky’s notebooks show he didn’t know where he was going. Even after finishing the novel’s penultimate part he still had not worked out whom, if anyone, the “idiot” Prince Myshkin would marry. Besides these plot uncertainties, many characters have motivations which were not merely complex and contradictory, but outright impenetrable. I also regularly found myself asking myself, for a given group of characters, how on earth they knew one another well enough to haunt one another’s living rooms. I have no answer to any of this but will do my best to at least tackle the plot’s outline.  

Prince Myshkin (the name makes him kin to mice), a young man suffering from epilepsy, returns from Switzerland to Russia, somewhat cured of his ailment. On the train he meets another young man, Rogozhin, who has just inherited significant wealth. Rogozhin wants to use the money to win the heart of the beautiful Nastasya Philippovna. Nastasya is capricious and flighty and captivates the prince too, who seems to want to save her from her own self-destructive decisions. At the same time, the prince meets and falls in love with the Epanchin family, especially one of their daughters, Aglaya. Several hundred pages somehow pass and characters come in and out, but really there are few who matter. Money-mad Ganya, the drunken clerk Lebedev, and Ippolit, a young man dying of consumption, are the only others ones I discuss here.  

Before the characters, the first thing I noticed about The Idiot when I came to reflect upon it was the atmosphere, which is nothing less than apocalyptic. Dostoevsky wrote much of the novel in Italy while escaping debts back in Russia. The home of Catholicism, a religion he has the prince describe in an outburst as being worse than atheism, no doubt caused him psychic strain that is reflected in the writing and its moods. The novel begins on a train, and as with Anna Karenina or Effi Briest, this modern conveyance is not a neutral taxi by any means. We learn much later that Lebedev, who styles himself a hobbyist interpreter of the Apocalypse, (itself not a hobby one has in a healthy age), considers “the railway network spread across Europe” as in fact the “Star Wormwood”.  

Trains and musings on the Apocalypse are not the only things establishing a gloomy mood. Another relatively modern mistake freshly arrived in Russia is the newspaper. Characters are genuinely fascinated and disturbed by the news, which seems to reveal a more fallen world than had existed previously. Multiple murders in the papers are discussed to prove or disprove some speculation on human nature. Then there is illness, for the prince with his epilepsy is far from the only one suffering. Ippolit has consumption, Rogozhin’s jealousy and Ganya’s money obsession are both certainly a kind of illness, while it almost goes without saying that a vast number of characters are alcoholics too. What’s noteworthy is that the distribution of illness does not seem itself to be a moral statement about the sick as individuals. Instead, if everyone is ill, it makes their world ill.  

Into this atmosphere of fragility and decay comes the prince. I had remembered, or rather imagined, that the plot involved the prince’s kindness and simpleheartedness acting to reveal the moral failings of others by providing a contrast, but that is not what happens here. Instead, he is a more directly moral person than that. In his first encounters with the Epanchin daughters he discusses the sufferings of people undergoing capital punishment without any prompting, while at another point after being slapped he refuses to fight back or consider a duel, saying to the slapper “how ashamed you’ll be of what you’ve done.” Hence, the prince is more directly and strangely a voice of conscience. He draws our attention to violence we ignore – state violence, the cyclical violence involved in honour questions – albeit a little too naively, like someone at university home for the holidays who has just learned what critical theory is but not yet how to persuade anyone it makes sense.  

The prince may be the voice of conscience, but it is important to consider whether he can succeed at this within the story. While one phrase used to describe him is Christ-like, among the first words actually used in the novel is yurodivy  or “holy fool.” These historical, largely Russian figures, were typically poor itinerants who had dedicated their lives to Christ without a formal role within the Church. Their behaviours were often shocking and insane, but enough of society acknowledged them as having mysterious wisdom that they were largely left alone, only occasionally brought in as quirky dinner guests by nobles. To call the prince a holy fool says that his message and concerns may be important; it also, however, provides a framework for characters to ignore him as merely raving. So, too, does the designation of “idiot” on account of his illness. In short, while he wants to save, he’s not viewed as a saviour: even his famous assertion that “beauty will save the world” is quoted back at him in mockery. 

The Prince thus has the challenge of altering others’ perception of him if he wants to persuade others to do good in this world. But just as great a difficulty is the treatment of causation within the novel – the ideas of “logic” and “nature”. If we believe humans are supremely rational, The Idiot is a novel that will make no sense to us. At a key moment the Prince asks Rogozhin of Nastasya, “who consciously throws himself into the water or onto the knife?” The Prince is expressing a viewpoint that Nastasya refutes by her own existence and repeated, free, choices that harm her wellbeing – she chooses Rogozhin over the Prince, time after time. Lebedev states this point generally: “the law of self-destruction and the law of self-preservation are equally strong in mankind! The devil rules equally over mankind until a limit in time still unknown to us.”  

With Nastasya’s character, and not only, the novel makes Lebedev’s argument real. One of the murders reported in the newspapers provokes heated discussion among the characters precisely because the defence lawyer argues that the six murders committed by the man at trial were “natural”, due to his poverty. This is illogical, but perhaps at least partly true. Yet for the characters it is one more suggestion that their world is falling apart. At least for some of them. For others, they are themselves this decay. At Nastasya Philippovna’s birthday party, the highpoint of the novel’s first section, characters compete in telling the most bad things they have done. It is not a sequence to inspire hope about the human condition, but it also shows what the stakes of the lawyer’s assertion are – if we normalise the world as being illogical and morality as being a secondary concern, we enable further decline. 

One of the places where this sense of the consequences of bad thinking and a bad world are most obvious is in the case of Ippolit, the young man dying of consumption. In his multi-chapter “Necessary Explanation”, he explains just what it feels and what it means, to have death hanging over him. He can hardly do anything, because so much requires time and practice – like learning an instrument. It is only with death coming that he has a sense of the value of life, while all those who are alive but with the sound of ticking fainter place no real value upon their days. At first he uses his sense of life’s remaining possibilities to do good, helping out a stranger he meets on the street. But then he becomes angry with the idea of God, specifically why he should “praise that which has eaten me” with this death sentence. Finally, he decides that the only remaining action he can take, the “only thing I still have time to begin and end of my own will”, is precisely to head off this death sentence by taking his own life first.  

Dostoevsky is not an author we can easily call rational, but with these examples we can see that if human illogicity is a fact, there must be limits to our willingness to support it, or we will all end up like Ippolit or Nastasya and turn against life itself. In a letter Dostoevsky once wrote that “If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.” He did not say that anything else was preferrable to the truth. If irrationality is not bounded, the pathway to God gets narrower, not wider. It is into this irrational, illogical world, that the prince comes preaching goodness, only to find that it seems beyond his own redemption. The murder the novel ends with brings a sense of bleakness and total defeat that I was shocked to rediscover – it was even more horrific than the end of Demons.  

Perhaps this triumph of chaos and irrationality is foreseeable from the very first words, for it is also intimately linked to Dostoevsky’s writing style as well. Dostoevsky is not a gifted stylist, but his themes are well served by his style. For one thing, there’s a layer of uncertainty and confusion built into the narration. At the end of the novel’s first part, the prince leaves for Moscow for six months, but even though it is clearly important what takes place there, the narrator declares “we can supply very little information” about what happened. (One theory is that Dostoevsky had such a miserable time living in Moscow himself that he refused to ever write about it in his fiction – itself an insane reason for sabotaging his story.) At other points, the narrator admits to an impossibility in understanding other characters’ motivations. This makes the impossibility of saving the world feel not just like it’s the prince’s fault, but somehow more general. It is such a mess that not even the narrator can keep it together. 

And it is precisely the whole world that somehow feels like it needs saving here. It may have been simply because Dostoevsky was writing The Idiot while stuck in Europe, but it is as if almost nothing exists solidly in the book. There are no smells, there are very few sights, there are no noises except that of the squabbling people. And furthermore, these people do not talk like humans – they give unprompted speeches, they refuse to shut up. I had the feeling that they had to be like this, because as soon as a character stops talking, like one of Beckett’s narrators in his Trilogy, they seem to cease to exist. If Tolstoy’s characters all exist with a uniform vitality, however minor their role, due to his use of leitmotifs and physical descriptions, Dostoevsky’s characters gain all their vitality only through victory in the contest of voices and their silencing of others. This is therefore the perfect style for conveying desperation and egoism. 

The Idiot is my first Dostoevsky for about five years. Coming back, what shocks me is exactly what I expected to, even in spite of that expectation – the obsessive drive of his characters towards meaningful utterances. Characters talk about what matters to them, because it matters to them. They act and live as if they are in the last days, when almost all decorum is dead. Compared to, say, Mann’s Magic Mountain, there is far less sense of the characters holding back part of themselves, or of their ideas not being immediately bindable to real-world things. The Idiot is not the reflection of the isolated upon a Swiss mountain, but a work with one attempted murder, one real murder, and an attempted suicide. Mann’s work is brilliant too, of course, but in its directness Dostoevsky’s is incomparable.  

I read the novel again because I wanted to see what I might learn for my own little novel of ideas with an idiot, of a sort, at its centre. But what I see now is that I have so far not emphasised enough the desperation associated with beliefs that makes them fresh and vital to the bystanding reader, nor yet plotted enough scandals or actions where a decision is necessary, one that would make these beliefs feel like they have a real-world importance. As for Dostoevsky’s style, whether I want to take anything from that is a harder question to answer. But there are plenty more of his works out there to help me decide.